ook the nine for a ten,
in which case you were right to call for another card."

"It is not that," he wailed. "It is the spoiling of my combination, on
which I have wasted sleepless nights. A curse on my mad folly. Do you
know who the banker was?"

"No," said I.

"He was Captain Vauvenarde, the husband of Madame Brandt."

CHAPTER XIII

You could have knocked me down with a feather. It is a trite metaphor,
I know; but it is none the less excellent. I repeat, therefore,
unblushingly--you could have knocked me down with a feather. I gasped.
The little man wiped his eyes. He was the tearfullest adult I have ever
met, and I once knew an Italian _prima donna_ with a temperament.

"Captain Vauvenarde? The man with the shoebrush hair and the rolls of
fat at the back of his neck? Are you sure?"

The dwarf nodded. "I set out from England to find him. I swore to the
_carissima signora_ that I would do so. I have done it," he added, with
a faint return of his self-confidence.

"Well, I'm damned!" said I, in my native tongue.

I don't often use strong language; but the occasion warranted it. I
was flabbergasted, bewildered, out-raged, humiliated, delighted,
incredulous, and generally turned topsy-turvy. In conversation one has
no time for so minute an analysis of one's feelings. I therefore summed
them up in the only word. Captain Vauvenarde! The wild goose of my
absurd chase! Found by this Flibbertigibbet of a fellow, while I, Simon
de Gex, erstwhile M.P., was fooling about War Offices and regiments! It
was grotesque. It was monstrous. It ought not to have been allowed. And
yet it saved me a vast amount of trouble.

"I'm damned!" said I.

Anastasius had just enough English to understand. I suppose, such is
mortal unregeneracy, that it is the most widely understood word in the
universe.

"And I," said he, "am eternally beaten. I am trampled under foot and
shall never be able to hold up my head again."

Whereupon he renewed his lamentations. For some time I listened
patiently, and from his disconnected remarks I gathered that he had gone
to the Cercle Africain in view of his gigantic combinations, but that
the demon of gambling taking possession of him had almost driven them
from his mind. Eventually he had lost control of his nerves, a cloud
had spread over his brain, and he had committed the unspeakable blunder
which led to disaster.

"To think that I should have tracked him down--for this!" he exclaimed
trag